Doing research for a speech, Kelly Lovejoy found and sent the following quote:

A wonderful harmony arises from joining together the seemingly unconnected.

~Heraclitus c.500BC

Connect • the • Dots

Connect the Drops, about what Pushpa's daughter Veda has learned from her fascination with rain, puddles and thunder.

Hi Sandra,

You are always talking about making connections and I made one yesterday from something you wrote. You said on [UnschoolingDiscussion] that Keith bought a concertina. That reminded me of a conversation my husband Buck and I had many months ago. We were listening to the Harry Belafonte song "Angelina" (Angelina, Angelina/ Please bring down your concertina/ And play a welcome for me/ 'Cause I'll be coming home from sea) and we wondered what a concertina was and what it sounded like. We did some research and asked a musician friend. I bought the Harry Belafonte CD with "Angelina" after watching and liking his music in "Beetlejuice." It's just another cool connection that proves that learning is everywhere.

Thanks,

Marin Holmes

JAMES BURKE

"I learned more from these shows than from 12 years of public schooling. Thanks." (I don't remember who wrote that, but it's a sentiment shared by many..)

He did a later series called The Day the Universe Changed, and you might be able to find those you YouTube.

CONNECTIONS: How Learning Works

"That reminds me..."

That's all it takes. If one thing makes you think of another thing, you form a connection between them in your mind. The more connections you have, the better access you have to cross-connections. The more things something can remind you of, the more you know about it, or are learning about it.

Flat representations can't show these connections. Neither could an elaborate three-dimensional model, because when you consider what a thing is or what it's like, you not only make connections with other concepts, but experiences and emotions. You will have connections reaching into the past and the future, connections related to sounds, smells, tastes and textures. The more you know about something, the more you can know, because there are more and more hooks to hang more information on—more dots to connect.

I got the idea for this kind of graph from Trust the Children: A Manual and Activity Guide for Homeschooling and Alternative Learning by Anna Kealoha.

Here's a simple mathematical example:
But being more "cross-disciplinary" about it, not limiting to just one area, we've played with them more like this:

And any of those can become "the center" and branch out to everything else in the whole wide world. But at the heart of this exercise is what is and what isn't: What IS a thing, and what is not the thing? What is like it and what is unlike it?

The first of those three graphs hasused to have an error in it that most people don't notice or mention; sorry—but it can serve as proof that even adults with college degrees can make a math error and life still continues!

THINKING AND KNOWING

Thinking's fancy name is "cognition."
Think and thought are very old English words. Those actions happen in your mind, in the realm of ideas and feelings.

Another old word for that sort of thing is "ken" which survives in a few drinking songs and some phrases in Scottish dialect. It's the root work of "know" and "knowledge." (Now you can tell your kids why they're spelled with a "k"—being forms of "ken," so that the "k" was pronounced in those sword-yielding days of yore.) Knowing is more related to seeing, recognition and perception. Maybe its nearest Latinate equivalent is "awareness"—familiarity with a thing from direct experience—but "knowing" is stronger. It can be muscle deep when you know how to do something physical.

LEARNING

Where do thinking and knowing turn to learning? Right at the edges, where you think something new, or know something different. Learning comes from connecting something new to what you've already thought or known.

ASSOCIATING ONE THING WITH ANOTHER

Each idea, object, concept, person, song, motion—anything you can think of—has personal associations for you. You have an incalculable mass of connections formed in your brain and will make more today, tomorrow, on the way home, and in your sleep.

What you know can be added to, or amended, but rarely deleted. Some things are best not learned, which is why it's so important to be careful what you say and how you say it (and to drive carefully, and all that).

Some people do try to encapsulate ideas or experiences and forget them. Sometimes other memories are shut off along with that. That’s a good reason for analyzing traumatic events and sorting through instead of trying to encase them. Too many "do not enter areas" in your mind will slow down connections, and also will inhibit the biochemicals that help make learning fun and easy.

My daughter and I like to play "hidden picture" games on the computer - they're stories, often mysteries or re-told faerie tales, myths and legends, and the hidden objects are sometimes very antique items as a result. And sometimes the names of items are different than the names we know as Americans. Those sorts of things make good conversation starters, but also just bits of information. We don't necessarily need to talk about all the differences, they swirl into our "general knowledge" fill in unexpected gaps, or linger and make other connections later on.

Recently we've been watching xxxHolic, and now have the manga series to read. It's fascinating on a number of levels, one of which is that it touches on mythology and folklore from several different cultures as well as pure fantasy - and we don't always know which. Sometimes, like this morning, I'll go and google something to find out for sure, but other times Mo will say "oh, I saw that in a Pokemon episode" or "that's like something I saw in My Little Pony" and it will give us both a reference point. Or she'll recognize a historical or literary reference in one comic or cartoon from having had it quoted in another - Spongebob is great for that, along with shows like Futurama and Ben Ten. In a little while, we're going to watch the xxxHolic version of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I'm wondering if she'll recognize it as a Shakespeare play she saw when she was 6 or 7. We'll see! She's just as likely to say "oh, I saw that on a cartoon - it's Shakespeare".

That's part of the magic of unschooling - information swirls around, connects and reconnects until you're not really sure where learning begins and ends and where any particular adventure will lead you.

[F]rom my point of view and from my experience, if art and music lead a kid conversation to Italy, and they make this connection at 10:30 at night, my choice is to say "Go to sleep" or to get excited with them, and tell them the Ninja Turtles were named after Renaissance artists, and that all the musical terminology we use, and most of early opera, came from Italy. That maybe the Roman Empire died, but Rome was not through being a center for advanced thought. Or however much of that a child cares about. And some of that will work better with an art book out, and maybe a map of the world. Look! Italy looks like a boot for sure, and look how close it is to Greece, and to the Middle East. Look who their neighbors are to the north and west, and how much seacoast they have. Look at their boats.

Maybe the child is seven, though, and Italy isn't on the state's radar before 8th grade geography.

So I don't look at the state's requirements. I look at my child's opportunities. And I think the moment that the light is on in his eyes and he CARES about this tiny bit of history he has just put together, that he wants me to say "YES, isn't that cool? I was much older when I figured this out. You're lucky to have great thoughts late at night."

And if he goes to sleep thinking of a camera obscura or the Vatican or gondoliers or a young teenaged Mozart seeing Italy with his dad, meeting people who thought they would remain more famous than Mozart... I think back to the circumstances of my own bedtimes as a child and I WANT to fill him with pictures and ideas and happy connections before they go to sleep, if that's what he seems to want. I could be trying to go to sleep and being grouchy and he could be in another room trying to go to sleep and being sad, or we can go on idea-journeys and both go to sleep happy.